AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“It wouldn’t have been a big deal,” he continued, “if Grant hadn’t been so highly leveraged. It nearly bankrupted us.”
“Couldn’t you have gone after Markovic?”
“We tried. He declared bankruptcy shortly thereafter.”
She sunk her teeth into her bottom lip. “Your father blamed himself.”
He pulled his gaze from the water and brought it to rest on her face. “It was a perfect storm. He lapsed into depression, the stress of the run for governor hit him and he took his life.”
A lump formed in her throat. “Oh, Coburn. I’m so sorry.”
“Harrison was the one who found him, sprawled over his desk. I’ve never seen a rage even come close to him that night. He tore my father’s study apart. He went for the gun in the safe. An eye for an eye, he said.”
Her breath caught in her throat. “He was going to kill Markovic.”
“I managed to talk sense into him. But Harrison vowed he would destroy Markovic the same way he had destroyed our father. I told him to let it go, that he would destroy himself in the process. That nothing would ever bring our father back, but it was this holy grail for him, the only thing he ever wanted. It blinded him to anything else.”
“He spent seven years laying the groundwork, until we had rebuilt Grant and Markovic had risen from the ashes. Then he quietly bought up every global supplier Markovic had to cripple him, to destroy him. He arranged a meeting with Markovic in Washington last year, intent on bringing him to his knees face-to-face. But he didn’t do it.”
“Why?”
A wry smile curved his lips. “I’d like to say he finally listened to me, but I think it was Frankie. He said she was his conscience.”
She absorbed the horrific, tragic tale and what it must have been like for Clifford Grant’s two boys to go through it. To watch their father shattered like that and the shame they must have felt along with their grief. She had always known her husband was a product of his heartbreaking past, that his need to be in constant motion was motivated by a consuming desire to forget. But only now did she understand how much that night must have colored his life. Shattered him.
“And what of you, Coburn?” She pinned her gaze on his face. “If you didn’t have vengeance to fuel you, how did you cope?”
He shrugged. “I moved on. Righting a wrong with another wrong is never a solution. Harrison hated that I felt that way, hated that I wouldn’t back him in his plan. He thought it showed a lack of loyalty. But selling my soul to the devil was something I wouldn’t do.”
He had run instead. Her heart broke a little bit more for him.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me this?” she asked quietly.
His gaze skipped away from hers. “You don’t need to know our dirty family secrets.”
Something throbbed inside her at that. “I’m not an expert at this, obviously, but isn’t that what we’re supposed to do? Confide our deepest, darkest secrets with each other so we can deal with them together?”
“Like you do?” he shot back. “You apparently spent our entire marriage thinking I was going to walk out the minute things got hard and yet you never thought to inform me of how you were feeling.”
“I have now,” she returned evenly. “It’s clear how little we actually communicated about what really mattered. We were too busy fighting about everything else.”
He was quiet, his gaze raking over her face in an intense, indigo-blue perusal. “Why hasn’t your mother left Wilbur? Why does she let him humiliate her like that?”
She blinked at the sudden turn in conversation. It was an answer she had to think about. “She said she loved him,” she finally responded. “That her marriage hadn’t turned out the way she’d expected it to, but that was life.”
“That was life?” An incredulous look spread across his face. “Your mother is a beautiful, charismatic woman. She could find someone else in a heartbeat.”
Her mouth flattened into a grim line. “My father kept telling her it was the last time and she kept believing him. When I called her on it, when I was old enough to understand just how twisted it all was, she asked me what she was supposed to do. She gave up her career for him. She gave up everything for him because his life was so demanding, because she had me to take care of. And then you’re fifty and it doesn’t seem so likely you’re going to walk out and find someone else.”
